By Bill Ives
Expert Author
Article Date: 2011-07-07
When Gartner named Qontext a cool vender in the context-aware computing space they wrote, "one of the holy grails in the collaboration market is the ability to embed collaboration services directly into business processes." This allows you to "build the collaboration service directly into the business process and make historical collaboration content accessible from the application." I could not agree more. I have long been a proponent of this approach going back to building process-aligned knowledge management systems beginning in the early 90s. Now Qontext has taken the approach a step further with its pinning concept. I recently spoke with Samir Ghosh, Qontext, VP, Business Development & Strategy, about their capabilities.
Enterprise 2.0 is about making interactions appropriately transparent and accessible. Qontext has added a new capability to promote this transparency and access. They call it "pinning." It is somewhat like tagging but different. Instead of putting a tag on an activity, you pin the activity to a record. It is the opposite of categorizing email, for example, where the receiver puts the tag or category on the item. The pinning is done by the system as content is created to connect it to its context. Once an item is pinned, you can easily go back to the source and see all the accumulated context.This is a great way to address the content overload issue. As more social content is created within the enterprise through the various tools, there will be a need to filter the fire hose. Qontext takes a different approach by allowing you to view contextually relevant information without having to determine manual filters.
Qontext can integrate or overlay any enterprise app, so this pinning can occur within the app, even across different apps and then viewed inside or outside the apps. Qontext can be integrated with such enterprise apps as salesforce.com, NetSuite, SugarCRM, LeadFormix, HRnet, LeanTaaS and Herald Logic. The integration can be done through a pop-up or directly through the app UI. Here is a sample screen of Qontext operating inside NetSuite.
Here you can see pinned items in a NetSuite application.
Organizations can also use the Qontext suite as a stand-alone collaboration portal. It has a full suite of collaboration features such as document management, threaded discussions, bookmarks, status updates, video and photo sharing, polls, quizzes, slide sharing, surveys, blogs and wikis that operate in the cloud or on-premises.
Qontext also has an activity stream that goes across applications. I think this is a core feature for enterprise 2.0 apps. Samir mentioned that Gartner predicts that by 2012 over half of organizations will be using activity streams. With their pinning concept, Qontext complements activity streams in an interesting manner. Activity streams can provide an awareness of what is happening in the enterprise and pinning can give you better access to the context of these events. Below is a Qontext activity stream within NetSuite.
Qontext provides a comprehensive collaboration suite. Their pinning concept appears to be an excellent innovation. It will be interesting to see how it gets adopted and how it evolves in both use and capabilities as this adoption occurs.
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